Dr. Kristen jumps on the blog to talk about how creating requires rest:
Do you ever feel like being quiet?
I know the introverts among us are saying, “Yes all the time. I want to be quiet all the time.” I guess this is more for the extroverts and verbal processors.
I have felt like being quiet lately. This is really rare for me, as somebody who processes out loud, and as somebody who draws energy from other people and conversations with them. but lately, I haven’t felt… up for it? My thoughts have been too loud, my ideas too unformed. I guess I haven’t felt that they were even ready for processing, they were so jumbled.
I can’t be the only one who has ever had a season like this. I know there are others that have felt the need to draw into themselves when that’s a rare occurrence for them. So I wonder, if you’re one of those people, what have you done when you felt the need to be quiet when your job requires you to speak?
I’m learning that my answer has to be to be okay with it.
I was talking to a friend of mine this week, who is also an extrovert, about this feeling that I had nothing to say. I joked that I had no idea what to write in newsletters, or in LinkedIn posts, because I spent all my words on the book. I felt too drained to contribute much to my team, and any extra energy I had went to preparing talks and trainings for our clients. My strategic talking well was (is) empty.
She reminded me that it’s okay to not have words, to not have ideas, to not be generative. Creating requires rest, even if that creating is simply the creation of ideas expressed in words.
TL;DR? She reminded me it’s okay to not know what to say in a newsletter. I’m not a failure of a writer, or a lazy thinker. I simply need to be quiet and rest.
Maybe you need this reminder, too. That creating requires periods of not creating. It’s something we talk about in the book, an intersection of two of the Four R’s. We need to remember to rest, and to remember that we can’t create everything. So I offer this to you today, in my period of quiet. I hope it serves as a reminder that you need as much as it’s a reminder I needed.
(Also, please note that this idea is in the book I co-wrote and I still needed the reminder. Le sigh.)
